| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: his life's end.
"I have my notes of that time, and now read-
ing them over I am not able to understand how a
man could attain to the state of mental exaltation
which I arrived at. It was a torturing but a
happy time."
Further on he writes,--
"In those two years of intellectual work, I dis-
covered a truth which is ancient and simple, but
which yet I know better than others do. I found
out that immortal life is a reality, that love is a
The Forged Coupon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: voice. She had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart's words: she knew
at once that they were ruined. In the dark hours which followed,
that awful fact overshadowed even her father's slow and difficult
dying. To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct
when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side
with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated
train to start. Lily's feelings were softer: she pitied him in a
frightened ineffectual way. But the fact that he was for the most
part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the
room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of
a stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: She continued to talk and to surge vaguely about the little draped
stuffy salon while Pemberton sat with the boy, whose colour
gradually came back; and she mixed up her reasons, hinting that
there were going to be changes, that the other children might
scatter (who knew? - Paula had her ideas) and that then it might be
fancied how much the poor old parent-birds would want the little
nestling. Morgan looked at Pemberton, who wouldn't let him move;
and Pemberton knew exactly how he felt at hearing himself called a
little nestling. He admitted that he had had one or two bad days,
but he protested afresh against the wrong of his mother's having
made them the ground of an appeal to poor Pemberton. Poor
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